Did New York Times Scrub 'War On Coal' Quote By Obama Advisor?

Daniel P. Schrag, a White House climate adviser and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, tells the New York Times "a war on coal is exactly what's needed." Later today, President Obama will give a major "climate change" address at Georgetown University.

“Everybody is waiting for action,” Schrag tells the paper. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Obama's speech today is expected to offer "a sweeping plan to address climate change on Tuesday, setting ambitious goals and timetables for a series of executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for the ravages of a warming planet," according to the Times.

Here's the full context of Schrag's quotation:

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.

“Everybody is waiting for action,” he said. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

If you follow the link provided by Halper, the quote by Schrag -- and indeed any mention of his name -- is missing, though it shows for the moment in the cached version in Google:

The revised version of the article however, has been de-Schrag-ed, despite at least one early commenter referencing the quote:

Ever since current editor Jill Abramson famously said in 2011, “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” -- only to have that quote airbrushed out hours later, it seems like the Times' touch-up artists have gone into overdrive, removing doubleplusungood crimethink remarks, even after they've been quoted by dozens of blogs and Websites -- and in this case, the Drudge Report and Instapundit -- before the Gray Lady has tossed the original quote down the Memory Hole. But then, each time they airbrush an article, the original quote becomes magnified that much more, much like the Barbra Streisand Effect.